The Book on Fire (8 page)

“Yes. Well ...”

“After the rains, the Nile comes, up, up. Houses fall, everything
underwater. Fish in the bed. Crocodiles in the kitchen. But when it goes down,
you plant seeds. Now the Nile is up. In my painting. You understand?”

“Sure. More gin?”

“Always more gin.”

I could see the fishing boats like shavings off crayons in the
western curl of the bay, and the long wharf. Sunfloes broke and reformed on the
sea as clouds buffed the sky, but my thoughts took the paternoster to the
ground floor, and lower, beneath the cellars and foundations to where books
slumbered and shaven-headed librarians wandered silently through caverns,
feather dusters in their hands.

****

Occasionally
a woman has snagged in my mind like a burr. Obsession does not make us
monogamous, despite the fairy tales. Rather, it turns the world into a woman.
You fall in love with palm trees, rain, your mother. There is a treatment for
this disease. Come.

Two a.m. I entered the hot parlors of the Tempest: fumes, geysers of
colored light. I was deaf the instant I stepped through the doors, but the
beats trampled my bones, jangled my neurons, so there was no need of eardrums.
The bartender lip-read my order and slid an arak through the slick on the zinc
and I sat in a corner, watching the dancers boiling. Already the girls were
swarming. They emerged from the murk like sharks. One brushed my leg,
disappeared, returned to sit on the arm of my chair. She put her tongue in my
ear, warm slug. On the dance floor she wiped her belly on my cock. She was
sixteen, all in tinsel and cotton, coarse hair falling over her face. She
couldn’t keep her balance on her platform shoes; I had to hold her up by the
ass. The music slowed and she slumped against me, nipples fingering my chest.
Lights circled on the floor like small suns in a palm grove. I felt a tickle at
my cheekbone. She might have been whispering. For a while we meandered around
the floor, which was tilting and splintering, then ordered a tableful of
alcohol and cigarettes. The girl smoked and drank like an urchin eating
sausages, gulping and spluttering. When she was drunk enough, I dragged her out
and into an alley, shoved her against a doorway. Her tits were soft. She
smelled like charred roses, tasted of yeast and ashes. She might have said
something. She pulled up her little skirt and there was her bony cunt for me to
fuck, so I did. It felt good. Then I placed the book in her hand—this was
Alexandria, city of book whores.

Now, as if a storm had passed, my mind was suddenly clear. I could
see each cobblestone I trod, the litter in the gutter. The stars had ceased
their quavering. I walked down to the corniche and sat a while watching the
sea, which I could not hear, my eardrums ripped out. The sea was big and full
of lights.

I went to bed, but it was a long time before I slept, the music
still whacking away in my head. And I thought I’d succeeded, I thought I’d
shaken that burr loose, my head would be clear again, I could drink my
macchiato and read my novel, but I woke in the afternoon from dreams of a
shaven head bent over a book, of slim brown fingers turning pages, and knew it
was all in vain.

****

I read
the books she read. After she set them on a shelf, her bookmark—a palm leaf
from the library grounds—still within the pages, I took them down, read to
where she’d stopped. There is no keener path to someone’s heart. Following her
through the pages, I felt I was stalking a wild beast, its spoor these inky
footsteps I deciphered, in a dozen scripts. And as I stalked her, I learned
that she was also stalker, huntress, seeking what all readers seek: the beautiful,
the annihilating, book. Poetry and story are the unruly siblings of literature,
constantly squabbling and separating. They live in different cities, will
hardly deign to speak at family reunions. In the book we seek, they have broken
all laws and moved in together, flagrantly incestuous, but that book does not
exist. We can sense it, though, long for it, the book so beautiful it will
survive even death, even fire.

She jotted notes in the margins, a dialogue with the texts, with the
authors, with other readers, which sometimes spun into soliloquy. I studied her
handwriting, trying to decipher her spirit from the curl of the c, the delicate
e, the tail of the Q. Her prose, even in these marginalia, was careful,
questing; many words struck out, thoughts stashed into each other like nesting
dolls. I found myself most enamored of the small drawings tucked into corners;
letters doodled into figures, the G a reading girl, the B pregnant, the S in
prayer. Drawings like dreams, the effluvia of our obsessions. I wanted to kiss
them but was afraid of smearing the ink. I left giddy with desire.

****

I
could not read. Back at the hotel I sat on the balcony clutching my demitasse
or wineglass, peering at pages, but they lay beneath the sea. For an hour, I’d
rub paper between my fingers, while my eyes foundered in the bay. I could
sometimes make out a stanza before the lines swam, and again I’d remember her
face and the rhymes would clang between my ears.

I lost at chess and badminton.

“He’s drinking too much,” said Zeinab.

“Not enough,” said Karim.

Even the head waiter at the Elite noticed my distraction and tipped
into my wineglass a dollop of a tonic concocted of desiccated lion penis and
curdled buffalo semen, which he claimed would invigorate my manhood. It turned
the wine blue and salty but had no effect on my mood.

****

One
midnight, as I exited the Elite, having polished off a late dinner of grilled
swordfish, red rice with almonds and raisins, half a carafe of Omar Khayyam,
and a couple
Gothic Tales
, I heard above the French pop from the open
doors behind me, above the clatter of a late tram and squabbling lovers at
Pastroudis, strains of something richer, denser. I strolled down Sharia Fuad to
investigate, aware that I was moving along the most ancient road of this
ancient city, once the Canopus Way that led from gate to gate of the old city,
and which has since borne a hundred names. I muttered those names as I walked,
treading them underfoot.

The music faded, then resurfaced as a single clarinet, faint as an
early star. The note wavered, deepened, and was joined by a tenor crying the
name of a girl:
“Aida!”
The music seemed to shift as I walked, coming
now from the south, now the east, but finally settled north of the sidewalk,
and I looked through an archway into the stone courtyard of the opera house,
guarded by the immense bronze figure of the seated poet. Now a soprano soared
like a spark into the space:

“La
… foresto virgini
.

Di
fiori profumate,

In
estasi beate

La
terra scorderem
.
”

A half moon brushed the seated
statue with blue, ink soaking the bronze folds of turban and galabiyya, soaking
the bronze books beneath his chair. I longed to peel apart those metal leaves.
Though the courtyard was deserted, I stayed in the shadows as I moved around
its edge. The ticket collector napped in his booth beneath a painted poster of
a lissome Nubian. On the roof of the theater was a certain window, long known
to thieves, beside which we kept a wicker chair and an antique pair of gold
opera glasses, and from which one commanded an immaculate view of the stage.
Many an evening I’d brought a bottle of Chianti to this star-ceilinged private
box and reclined, feet up, immersed in
Orfeo
or
La Bohème
,
lassoing stars with my smoke rings, swigging wine straight from the bottle.

But this night, as I sidled through the courtyard, I saw two figures
dancing on the roof to the throbbing of the violins. Approaching, I recognized
Karim and Amir, teetering with drawn knives among flagpoles and parapets. From
their writhing silhouettes it appeared Karim would surely shred Amir into brown
and lavender confetti at any moment, but the pickpocket, though flimsy as one
of Karim’s djinns, sucked himself away from the blade. Radamès and Aida
bantered as I scaled the wall and sat between the masks of terror and tragedy,
watching the dancers.

“Il
ciel dei nostri amori

Come
scordar potrem?”

“Sotto
il mio ciel, più libero

L’amor
ne fia concesso;

Ivi
nel tempio istesso

Gli
stessi Numi avrem.”

After Aida’s lovely, hopeless
offering, I lit a cigarette. The flame snapped the skirmishers out of their
deadly pas de deux and they stood apart, panting.

 “And what’s the fuss about, pray?” I asked. “Don’t let me stop you.
Do go on. I’m just curious what started it.”

“Ah, fuck it,” said Karim. He sliced the sweat off his brow with his
blade, then wiped the knife on his trousers, leaving a dark triangle on the
blue. He sat beside me, drove the knife shivering into a flagpole, pulled out
cigarettes, and shook up three. I lit them.

“What’s the quarrel?” I asked.

Karim shrugged. “The usual.”

“Zeinab?”

“What do you think Zeinab wants, Balthazar?” Amir asked.

“Good question. Have you checked her pockets?”

“Nothing but a knife. I sliced my fingers to the bone.”

“What do you think, Karim?”

“She doesn’t exist. Not in this world.”

“So how are you going to resolve this?”

Karim yanked his knife out of the flagpole and aimed it at Amir.
“The easy way,” he said.

“You’ll never catch me,” Amir told him, but he sounded more
melancholy than usual.

I sat on the chair, and with my bodkin pried the cork from the
stashed wine bottle. Amir and Karim sat on either armrest and we passed the
bottle back and forth.

Now soprano and tenor joined:

“Vieni meco, insiem fuggiamo
Questa terra di dolore.
Vieni meco t’amo, t’amo!
A noi duce fia l’amor.”

Through the window, like peering through a rip in reality, we
watched the spotlit lovers clasp and part.

V. The Youngest Librarian

How do
you approach a reader? A noise or a nudge is too much, will shove her too
abruptly out of the world she inhabits. No, you must seek a gentler entrance.

I began switching her bookmarks. One day I swiped the palm leaf and
replaced it with a pressed rose. Then I hid, heart like timpani, while she
entered and took the book from the shelf and poured a glass of wine and parted
the pages. She paused a few seconds, wineglass a hand span from her lips, when
she saw the rose. Setting down the glass, she lifted the stem, twirled it
slowly. Her gaze bounced around the room. Then she shrugged, tapped the brittle
petals against her lips, and began to read.

Next day, I left a feather from a hoopoe’s crest, and this time she
laughed aloud, then frowned and flipped through the pages searching for other
clues. As she read that evening, every so often she’d stop and lift the feather
and draw it across her cheek, then replace it within the pages.

Over the next week I left the following bookmarks: stripe of
seaweed, peacock wishbone, sand dollar, moth wing, lemon peel, molted asp skin.
Now she knew the game and would enter the room eagerly, rush to the bookshelf
to discover her present, which she’d examine for a while before turning to the
book. She began to read more slowly as she entered the final chapters, trying
to prolong this enchanted story that brought her gifts.

On the day I knew she’d finish the book I returned the palm leaf,
but I’d pricked a message into it. She smiled when she saw the leaf, nodded a
bit sadly, then bent to it, held it to the light, and read my query. She leaned
her head back against the cushion and looked up at the ceiling. “What do I
desire?” she whispered. “Strawberry jam? Sea breeze? Kiss?” She smiled, then
sat up and finished the book. But when she lifted the candle from its bracket
and left the room she took the leaf with her.

The next evening, when she returned to her room, she found a jar of
strawberry jam on her pillow. I spied on her through the keyhole as she
startled. Questions struggled on her lips. She took up the jar and held it on
her lap. Then she twisted off the lid and lifted out a sticky strawberry and
placed it on her tongue.

I saw her hunted stare the next day as she moved through the
library. Often she glanced quickly over her shoulder. But a thief walks in the
second world, among djinns and angels, watching but invisible, and she saw only
her shadow.

She moved through the library that afternoon, chamber to chamber,
plucking books. No hesitation: she knew exactly what she wanted. When she’d
gathered three, she returned to the chamber where I’d first encountered her and
on a shelf built a little house of books, posts and lintel, a house or a
shrine. In the alcove they made she placed a pomegranate. These were her
offerings. Three books and a blood-red fruit.

Seated on her sofa, drinking her wine, I read the books, ransacked
the pomegranate’s ruby honeycomb, recklessly swallowing the seeds, and knew I
had eaten her heart. Harboring the books and seeds in my belly, I carried them
into the upper world. It was utterly changed. Those three books had bent the
bay backward and dyed the sun a smoky mauve. The soles of my thief’s shoes
banged on the tin cobbles. Lifting a fingernail, I tapped the china sky. I
twirled on palace gables, cartwheeled over the waves, and might have blown off
among the stars like an escaped balloon had Nura not plucked at my arm as I
skipped along the corniche wall. “Come,” she said.

We took the tram to the docks at Anfushi and walked down to the
waterfront. On a strip of grimy beach, between stacked crates of figs and sacks
of cotton and coffee beans, under the spider-leg architecture of cranes, a man
scooped mussels from boiling water with a slotted spoon. We sat on an upturned
crate, side by side, by the water’s edge, eating mussels and fried potatoes off
newspaper, squeezing halved limes over the shells. A colorful flotsam of beer
bottles and cigarette butts, syringes and mango seeds and stray buoys jostled
in the surf. Mutilated cats squabbled over fish heads. While I lit a cigarette,
Nura ladled a little heap of icing sugar into a corroded spoon and fried it till
it sizzled brown and sticky. She handed me a scarf to knot around her skinny
bicep, then sucked the caramel into a syringe and I watched as she searched for
a vein in her devastated arm. A tiny poppy bloomed in the glass, withering as
she pressed the plunger. Replacing the paraphernalia in her handbag, she cocked
her sparrow head at me, her glossy eyes. “I didn’t know you got high,
librarian. What are you on?”

I held up the cigarette.

“Come on,” she smiled. “I watched you along the corniche. You were
flying. What’s your poison?”

“You want to know my drug, Nura?” I reached into my pocket and
pulled out a paperback. “Mainline this.”

She touched the cover shyly. “You’re so smart, Balthazar. Why do you
hang out with us?”

“Books are a drug, no nobler than heroin or opium. They’re the
addiction I feed with my thievery.”

“They don’t ruin your veins.”

“They can ruin your heart. And a bad trip can give you
hallucinations for the rest of your life. As can a good trip. The great
libraries of the world are filled with people ruined or beatified by books.
They walk through the hallways twitching, a thousand voices in their ears. They
have no idea whether you’re real or a character from a printed page.”

“But you’re always reading, Balthazar. Why were you flying today?”

“That’s the difference between heroin and literature.” I touched the
skin of her inner arm, the overlapping circles of fading bruises—plum, peach,
lemon, loquat. “The drugs you take are lonely voyages. I can share your needle
but I can’t share your trip. Each reading is separate, to be sure, but I can
come much closer to another person’s experience. Yesterday I shared someone
else’s drug.”

“Whose?”

“I don’t know her name. She shaves her head, she wears glasses.”

“Oh, I think I’ve seen her. On a tram, late at night.”

“Perhaps.”

Nura laid her head on my shoulder. “I wish I could take your drugs,
Balthazar, but books are hard. Needles are easy.”

I put my arm around her and we sat there like strung-out lovers,
watching the seethe of refuse in the foam. Along the horizon, ships lay like a
string of festival lights. One must have come in, because we heard the dockers
bellowing beyond the crates to our right.

“Have you ever tried to quit?” I asked.

“A couple of times. But I love it too much. The drug and the life. I
know I take a little death with the sweetness each time. And I’m afraid, of
course, but I tell myself death’s just another vision, the last vision. You
look at my arms, and I can see the disgust in your lips, but”—she dabbed her
fingers on the scars like a concertina player, glancing down at them fondly,
ruefully—“these wounds have given me so much joy. What about you? Have you ever
quit?”

“Never tried. Once in the Sahara a camel ate my book, and I learned
what I become without my fix: a raving madman. I love it too much. The drug and
the life.”

“We don’t see you as much as we used to.”

“No.”

“Where do you go?”

“Down.”

She nodded. “You take care, Balthazar, okay?”

I kissed her cheekbone, smoothed her hair back from her temple.

“Sweetheart,” I said.

****

I returned
to my rooms that evening, to the shelf within my wardrobe, and removed a single
book. Carrying this book, I walked to the lighthouse.

Once again Zeinab was waiting for me, this time at the entrance to
the lighthouse. I didn’t see her until I was within the archway, then heard the
gnash of bells like crushed foil.

“Have you thought at all about what you’re doing?” she said. “What
kind of perverted book thief have you become?”

“It will be safe underground.”

“Or so you think.”

“Yes. So I think.”

But I laughed as well as I placed the book upon a shelf in the room
the youngest librarian frequented. Zeinab was right—this was absurd. Alone of
the world’s book thieves, I had succeeded in penetrating the Library of
Alexandria, but now, inside this bibliophile’s paradise, I was not stripping it
of its treasures but was instead bestowing upon it one of my most treasured
possessions.

I lay in wait on an upper shelf, reading, nibbling cheese, sipping
from a flask of cocoa. When I heard her sandals in a distant cavern I snuffed
my candle. She poured her ritual glass of wine, then reached for her book. But
I had covered it with my own. She took down the new book slowly, turning it in
her hands, brushing her fingers across the leather binding, the gold leaf.
Still standing by the bookshelf, she opened to the first page and I saw her
lose herself, instantly, within the opening paragraph. When she looked up she
was thirty pages deep. She shook her head slightly, bent it again. Forgetting
her glass of wine, still immersed in the book, she moved to the sofa and sat
down, gingerly, so as not to jostle her eyes from the page, lay back, and
continued reading. This was a book I knew more intimately than my own body. I
knew the placement of every word on every page. I knew the stains, nicks,
tears, folds, and their histories. I had read it one hundred and eleven times,
and each reading was separate and fresh in my mind. So I could follow her
reading, knew from the slight shifting of her loins or quickening of her breath
or plucking of her thumbnail at the leather which part she’d come to. I had
never before watched someone read an entire book. It was like watching someone
live a life in three hours.

When she’d finished she lay back, staring at the ceiling. “Oh my
God,” she said. She stood up. She turned back to the book and placed her palm
upon it as if bestowing a benediction or receiving its mana, then went to the
bookshelf where her wineglass stood and drained its contents in a single gulp.
She paced around the chamber muttering, touching books and walls, seeing
nothing, like someone in a trance.

She lay on the sofa, placed the book on her breasts, and passed out.
I could hear her soft breathing. Slipping the book from her fingers, I blew out
her candle and left the library.

For three days I sat in my rooms drinking coffee and wine. I sent
Abdallah for sandwiches. I tried to read, to paint, but the words made no
sense, the colors would not adhere to the paper. The bustle in the midan seemed
the scurrying of ants. I woke myself, talking in my sleep. Three days were all
I could manage. Midnight of the third day I walked to the lighthouse.

When I next saw the youngest librarian, in a cavern so colossal her
candlelight could not finger the farthest shelves, she’d gone mad. She moved
around the perimeter of the chamber, dragging her hand across bindings,
stammering, howling. “Incubus!” she cried. “Demon lover! Why have you forsaken
me? I can’t read, I can’t sleep. Send me another bookmark, send me another
book.”

Her fingers scraped at the books, ripped some from their places, but
one glance and she cast them aside, leaving a trail of broken-winged creatures
on the carpets like downed grouse. I was her ghostly gundog, fetching the
discarded volumes after she’d exited the chamber, smoothing the pages,
replacing them on the shelves.

All that day I followed her, deep into the library, through rooms
I’d not yet encountered, through rooms I’d not imagined, had not been able to
imagine, through rooms she was able to enter, perhaps, only because of her
madness. The room of false gospels written by fallen archangels; the room of
nightmares of being devoured by one’s own children; the room of books written
by quadriplegics who dipped their tongues in ink. Rooms describing
constellations in alternate universes. Rooms of books written by shamans who
inhabited the bodies of lions. A room that contained a single book, made of the
cured skins of a hundred Nuer virgins. Its leaves were black and smooth as the
rinds of aubergines, its print the color of moonlight.

We met in a room of books written in blood, love lyrics written with
pricked fingers on scraps of newsprint or ripped bedsheets, by those who had no
other materials at hand, written in dungeons or tower-top cells, written by the
condemned, by those who faced the executioner’s scimitar at daybreak. There
were no bowls of apricots in this room, no sofas, no carpets, only the terrible
books and a stone floor.